Politics
Obama Transcript
Spencer tells me Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has posted the transcript of his Berlin speech. MSNBC is poring over the text too, noting the wall-tearing imagery reminiscent of Ronald Reagan and the Kennedy-like themes.
I personally perked up in this part of the speech:
Hoffnung
I'm barely watching the speech and he already seems like he's president. And like he's destined to be president. Challenging Germany to deepen our commitments in Afghanistan? Challenging to world to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the Cold War? Challenging us to embrace a thoroughgoing commitment to liberal internationalism? Yeah, that's the Obama Doctrine in effect. Are they already wearing t-shirts in Berlin that say Ich Bin Ein Obama?
(*"Hoffnung," I'm told, means "Hope" in German.)
With Hurricane Dolly, McCain May Have To Back Off On Offshore Drilling
As Sen. John McCain continues to tout offshore drilling -- and others in Congress start to jump on the bandwagon -- he's found it necessary to downplay the threat of oil spills, even in the face of powerful hurricanes. There's something ironic, then, about Hurricane Dolly hitting this week.
McCain was scheduled to make another offshore drilling push at an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico today, but the Category 2 storm changed his plans. Dolly has forced energy companies to evacuate some oil rigs and cut oil and gas production in the Gulf by 4.7 percent.
How Much?
The presidential conventions serve many functions--one of which is allow corporate interests a unique opportunity to pump unlimited amounts of money into the political parties. Corporate donations to candidates are banned. Individual contributions to are limited to $2,300. But contributions to the convention committees are not limited. And they don’t have to be publicly disclosed until October.
So our colleagues at Colorado Independent asked the question, if the donors to the convention committees aren’t seeking to secretly influence the political process, they should be willing to disclose how much they are giving, right?
Obama Out-Raises McCain in Arizona
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- After a Zogby Online poll earlier this month found Sen. John McCain trailing Sen. Barack Obama in Arizona, new evidence emerged today that McCain may not have a lock on his home state in November. The Arizona Republic features a front-page story reporting that Obama out-raised McCain in Arizona by 38 percent in June -- and McCain holds a narrow lead over Obama in total fund-raising in the state. From the Republic:
Safe and Sound
COLUMBUS, Ohio--And now for a laundry update.....
McCain Stumbles on Domestic Issues
This week was Sen. John McCain's chance to show the U.S. he hears their pain, but instead he himself complained -- about his opponent.
And All Their Liquids Are Gone Too
COLUMBUS, Ohio--"We're all going commando!"
That was the cry from the front of the John McCain press corps bus following our landing here in the heart of the heart of the country. Soon after reporters arrived in the Ohio capital, it was revealed that none--NONE--of the press luggage was boarded on the Straight Talk plane from Pennsylvania. This followed the scrapping of a planned trip to New Orleans due to weather, which thus brought us to the center of my home state. For the record, the luggage of both the Secret Service and the presumed Republican presidential nominee arrived safely.
McCain Cancels Trip to New Orleans Amid Competing Disasters
Sen. John McCain's trip to New Orleans just wasn't in the cards this week. McCain was scheduled to visit the Crescent City tomorrow to meet with Louisiana Gov, Bobby Jindal -- who today said he will not be McCain's running mate -- to promote his offshore drilling plan with a photo-op on an oil rig. However, Mother Nature had other plans, and the trip was canceled due to bad weather. If you've been watching cable news today, you might have heard something about a little hurricane named Dolly that is currently pummeling San Padre Island and the southern Texas coast. As a result, numerous oil production platforms and rigs in the Gulf of Mexico have been evacuated. The timing of the storm led Politico's Jonathan Martin to proclaim in a humorous headline that the weather, like the media, is liberal and therefore biased against McCain. Martin links to The New Republic's Jason Zengerle, who makes a strong case:
McCain Adviser: Obama's 'Words Matter, Except When They Pose an Inconvenient Truth'
The McCain campaign hosted a conference call with reporters to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Sen. Barack Obama's pledge that he would be willing to meet without precondition with several hostile foreign leaders. The McCain campaign had seized on the statement as a gaffe on the part of Obama, and focused on it as an example of the presumptive Democratic nominee's naivete. Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign-policy adviser to Sen. John McCain, took the opportunity to compare Obama's comments from one year ago at the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C., to those made earlier today in Sderot, Israel:
More on Misleading McCain Ads
A Wall Street Journal profile of Steve Schmidt -- who assumed day-to-day control of the McCain campaign at the beginning of this month -- gives some insight into the origins of the recent rash of misleading or flat-out false claims featured prominently in Sen. John McCain's campaign ads. From The Journal:
Another McCain Ad Dissected by FactCheck.org
FactCheck.org released another analysis of one of Sen. John McCain's recent TV attack ads against Sen. Barack Obama late Tuesday. This time, the non-partisan fact-checking Website concludes the ad, titled "Troop Funding," makes several statements that "are literally true but paint an incomplete picture." Among the charges is a claim that Obama "never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan -- which is true, but not really fair.
When Novak Is Duped, the Old Rules Are Out
BALTIMORE -- A day after he sent the press corps following McCain scurrying with a report that the presumptive Republican nominee would be picking a running-mate, Robert Novak has said he may have been used by the campaign.
In many ways yesterday illustrated how quickly we are to react to breaking news and the consequences of relying on sources with something to clearly gain. Only 24 hours ago I was sitting with other reporters in a hotel ballroom in Buffalo when Novak's report came across the web. Initially dismissed, the more we thought about it the more it made sense. McCain would be in New Hampshire the following day, not far from the vacation home of former rival and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He could steal some of Sen. Barck Obama's world tour thunder, take the news cycle for the day and stick it to the three national networks, whose anchors had followed Obama on his peace train. Before long we were hounding the candidate on the plane and then engaged in a long, drawn out conversation with campaign senior adviser Mark Salter, who declined to not only comment but refused to say whether there would or wouldn't be an announcement today.
RNC Cops, What You Gonna Do?
Our sister site Minnesota Independent has been scrutinizing the security woes surrounding September’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul, and the more our reporters look, the grimmer things get.
Last week, MNIndy reported that local law enforcement agencies are balking at sending officers to the RNC, citing legal and financial concerns (said one cop, “We want to make sure we get paid”). Now reporter Paul Demko is discovering that some police organizations listed as part of the official security team, well, aren’t really on the team.
On the Surge and the Awakening, McCain Doesn't Know What He's Talking About
Marc Ambinder brings us John McCain's interview with Katie Couric, in which he re-writes history about Iraq and claims Obama is the revisionist.
Vanity Fair Spoofs The New Yorker with McCain Mock Cover
This comes via Marc Ambinder. It's amazing that it took this long, but Vanity Fair is spoofing its downstairs neighbor, The New Yorker, with a satirical mock "cover" of its own. For those with extremely short memories, The New Yorker last week ran a controversial cover featuring a robe and turban-clad Sen. Barack Obama sharing a "terrorist fist jab" with his wife, Michelle -- who is depicted as an afro-sporting, AK-47-toting militant. (TWI weighed in here and here.)
On the magazine's Website, Vanity Fair features a caricature of Sen. John McCain supporting himself with a walker as his wife, Cindy, cradles bottles of prescription pills.
President McCain Would Hate Candidate McCain's Iraq Position
My colleague Matt DeLong reports that McCain aide Randy Scheuemann doesn't give an eff what the allegedly sovereign government of Iraq thinks about getting our dudes off of its lawn. Let's put politics aside for one second and think this through for a moment.
McCain Turns Back on Grand Canyon
Sen. John McCain has likened himself to Theodore Roosevelt -- who named the Grand Canyon a national monument. But McCain's record on the national park tells a different story.
McCain Escalates Obama Attacks
ROCHESTER, N.H. --Any degree of restraint and nuance in the attacks within Sen. John McCain's crusade against Sen. Brarack Obama has officially ended. It did so in the place, in the sate, where McCain has always come to renew himself, to begin again. It was here in 2000 where he rode the Straight Talk Express to a primary win against Karl Rove and Rove's man, then-Texas Governor George W. Bush. And it was here where he came and found a degree of rebirth in the summer of 2007, after he had to fire most of his national staff and was forced to run a tight campaign against better-financed Republican opponents.
And now McCain went to New Hampshire to take his ideological fight against Obama to unprecedented heights. Speaking to a small town hall gathering at the local opera house where reporters, stuck in the rafters, working from a table literally on a diagonal slant, McCain seemed at ease--even when locked in a verbal battle with an elderly woman in an Orange cardigan who challenged the very legality of the U.S. presence in Iraq.
But he pushed his traditional line of "I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war" to another level when he quipped, "It seems to me Sen. Obama would rather lose a war to win a campaign."
McCain Camp Offers a Little 'Obama Love'
It's no secret that many within the McCain campaign are not happy with the volume and tone of what they regard as the media's fawning coverage of Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Today, the McCain camp released a three-minute web video -- set to the tune of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons' "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" -- documenting some of the more glaring examples of what it perceives as favoritism. After watching the video, titled "Obama Love," its hard not to sympathize with Sen. John McCain. MSNBC's Chris Matthews provides much of the footage, and yes, it is embarrassing to watch. Have a look:
